Speaker 1: Hi everyone, today's video has 3 points and you're going to want to stick around because the third point is a secret as to the one thing that's stopping you from building the right team for your self-publishing business. So let's get into it. The topic we're going to discuss in today's video is how to build a self-publishing team. Now, when you're first getting started with self-publishing, you may be limited a bit by your budget that you have, or maybe you're not. It depends upon your starting point in this entire process. But one thing you're going to discover is there are a whole series of tasks for which either one, you don't have the skill to do those steps, or two, you don't want to do those steps. Because the fact is, is maybe designing a cover or trying to edit your own book, you're seeing that you're not able to do as good of a job as other people who are specifically trained or are skilled in those sets as you. And so that's one side of it. And the other side of it is maybe you've been doing a lot of these tasks, but you find them tedious and it's killing your motivation to continue to self-publish books as an author because you're exactly trying to do these steps that you really aren't as a person built to do. After all, maybe you just want to write some books, and this is a feeling that many authors have and it can completely destroy what you're doing, and the solution is building a team. But where exactly and how do we get started with that, and this is what we're going to discuss in today's video. This is Chris Baird from selfpublishingmadeeasynow.com, where self-publishing doesn't have to be so difficult. Check out my free self-publishing checklist below in the description where you'll find the secrets to getting your book out there, self-published and selling. And also hit the subscribe button so that I can help more people find this channel and help even more authors as they move through the journey, the self-publishing journey and getting their books onto the market and selling as well. So let's get into it. On my own story, this was kind of an interesting one because it was very surprising what exactly and how this would go about taking place. I had no idea this whole subject of a self-publishing team. When I first got started, I just started with, well, I had a Kindle book that told me how to go about creating a book for Kindle, and I also was watching some YouTube videos and some other books that I was reading at the time that were taking me through some of the basic steps necessary to get our books self-published. And as I was moving through the steps, I was writing a thousand words a day, everything was going just fine until I realized, well, I'm going to need a cover. I'm going to need like a cover designer. I'm going to need an editor. I'm going to need a narrator, somebody to do the formatting of my books. I may need a coach, somebody to help motivate me. Also what about the keywords and the descriptions and also with the paperback formats and narrators, you know, on the audiobook version. There were so many different roles and I began to understand that I wasn't going to be able to do all of these roles myself. I even tried to hire people out on Fiverr on certain gigs just finding random people who would do the job without costing too much money since I wasn't pulling in any money really at the time. But I discovered that this was also not particularly a great strategy because those people that I had been hiring, they were doing a poor job and I would just have to hire them again to fix the mistakes that they had made on the original job and since I wasn't even familiar with the steps, it was hard for me to see whether or not they were doing it correctly or incorrectly and that was a huge challenge for me. So what happened was some of the team that I started to build when I was getting going were just one-off jobs. That would be like in the gig economy where you're hiring a person to do a single job for you and you begin over time to begin to find the ways that you're going to best do this. what you need exactly is a great cover and then you test out a lot of cover artists or people who are doing ghost writing for you if you choose to go that route or finding keywords and these other things, single one-off jobs. But I also saw that why would I want to go with one-off jobs as opposed to you can just as well hire a team and train them. And that was actually the beginning which was, well, if you're going to hire a team then how exactly do you go about doing this? You have to have an idea of what it is you want them to do. And that was when I began to understand that the key to winning at self-publishing was in fact having a system where it's clearly going through the steps like a checklist, a system that pulls them through the steps, and then a team that can implement those steps. And that was one of the key things that I did. And I started in the beginning of creating courses where I would go through video courses explaining how to do these steps to my virtual assistants so that they would be able to put together my books instead of me having to put together the books and in fact those are the very courses that you find below in the description both with formatting and also with content marketing for your books. These very same steps because what better way instead of explaining to each of the virtual assistants how to go about doing it, why not just create a video where they could follow the simple easy to follow steps and have their book on the market and that was the beginning of me understanding that, wait a second, this also is relevant to self-publishers as well. Other self-publishers could use the very same content and these videos that I had created for my virtual assistants in order to get your books onto the market. So go ahead and check out below in the description you'll find a copy of my courses that I offer exactly in this area and I think you will also find it helpful. One of the things is you get feedback from your virtual assistants or from your teammates and they will take a look as they try to implement it, and then I change the video courses and improve them as a basis of that as things change within the world of Kindle. So those are definitely worth checking out. That was a mistake that I made very early on, which was trying to manually figure it all out myself without actually taking a course, which would take you very simply easily through it. I had seen a lot of other courses that are offered on the market by fake gurus with regards to self-publishing, where the courses are so complicated, you get lost almost in the first module, as opposed to the easy way of doing self-publishing, which is moving very easily through the steps, not seeing 50 ways to do each thing, but just one way to do things as we move through. And we build our team around these exact steps because they can also watch these videos and learn how to put the books together for us so that we don't have to do this. And that is what I'm all about, is doing it the easy way. And so, I was able to save a lot of time by having my virtual assistants use these exact videos and the system, which would be of checklists, and I also used Todoist, as I've mentioned in some other videos, in order to create projects that they would be able to do. And that program is very affordable, like $40 a year for one, a license, which is enough to then create the projects that your virtual assistants or whoever you wish to hire in order to go about doing the steps that you're gonna need to get your book onto the market. And I am very big on the system side of it, because in reality, for almost all products and services, it really comes down to your delivery system and the system itself of how exactly you produce these books, whether you succeed or fail, as opposed to just randomly trying to hope that your book is going to get on the market. And hope is a terrible way of trying to get your book self-published or building a team, which is something that I've spent a lot of time focusing on over the past several years. So how to build a self-publishing team. Here are the three keys. Number one, learn the basics of how to do what you're hiring these people to do first. I'm telling you that no matter what your budget is, it's probably a good idea if you yourself already know what it is you expect them to do for you. So if it comes to formatting, take the course that I have below, go through the course and learn how to do formatting and then you can hand it over to your virtual assistants or to somebody else to do it. And the same goes with cover design, keyword research, all of these things we discuss in these videos that I've created, the 300 plus videos that I've created here on YouTube going through and covering these specific topics to make sure that it is easy for you to figure it out first. But don't do this forever. Move on. We don't want to get burnt out on these steps, so it's best to then hire it out because then you're able to see you hire somebody to do it and you already know what to expect since you yourself have already been doing the very steps that you're asking them to do. So this is a very key point here, which is a key point that many people miss. You do not want to get burnt out on doing steps that you find tedious. Hire other people. Use the royalties that are coming from your book sales to pay for those people to these services for you. It actually is positive on multiple levels because you're able to provide work for other people, you're able to ensure that you're continuing to put out books and do things that you find exciting like writing the books as opposed to all of the other work. Some people think, well, I'll just wait forever for a traditional publishing company to hire to pay me just to write and then I can just write books all the time. But the problem that you don't understand is that they only want to hire you, they only want to pay you and have you as an author inside of their publishing company if they know that your book is going to sell and what better way of showing them this than already having a book that's selling. You self-publish it. You prove to them you have an audience of hungry readers. You're building that audience in your email list. There's all of these different things that you're already doing and so when it comes to your book you would say, look, I've got a new book. I'm interested in a deal for this book and they look and say, wow, we already see that you have a huge audience and people are buying your book already. And so it's all about having this momentum and that you have that team around you so that you're able to put out these books. And the best way, in reality, to market any given book that you have is to write another book. So you finish your first book, we have the funneling, we're using that content marketing as I've discussed. You can check out the course below. And you're continually pushing more traffic towards the books that you have. You're putting out new books, you're finding new readers and we are expanding your empire of hungry readers for your book and what happens is eventually you're going to start getting attention of some of these traditional publishers and then it's up to you to decide. You'll make less money in some ways if you go with them but sometimes people want to feel as an author that you've been accepted as a traditional, you're not a real author or something. It's nonsense but for many authors this is very important so this gives you that option And then you would come to them and say, look, I've got this amazing manuscript for a book. And at the same time, they're able to take a look and see that you already have books on the market that are selling. And they can see your following on Pinterest and Instagram and TikTok and all of these other places that many authors have actually had success at finding audiences. And they can even see your ranking as an author on Amazon. And so they would know already that you are not going to be a risk for them. And that is something that many authors under value is not seeing that. But how can you produce so much books with covers and descriptions and keywords and all of this? The answer is you're going to need to have that team. But let's get to the second point. You should transfer tasks over to your team so that you can focus on the one thing that your team is unable to deliver. And what that is, it's going to be you, your personality, so that's where the content marketing, face. I would not do anonymously with regards to your books unless you have multiple genres then you should use pen names but otherwise it's a good idea to use your face on your marketing. It will increase your sales and in addition you have to keep in mind that your VA, your virtual assistants or these other team members, they're not going to be able to actually match and do the work that you've been doing because this is the thing. Now one of the things from one of my marketing podcasts I like to listen to is referred to as the self-milking cow, which is the idea is that you as the cow, I know it's not a very nice way to look at it, but you have something like the milk is what you deliver. You shouldn't be the one who milks the self-milking as in you're taking the milk and you're processing it and you're transporting it and you're selling it, you're doing all of these tasks, when in reality you have a specific special power in what you're doing and what you're delivering that you should focus on and you should ask not how to do these other things but who can do these other tasks to ensure that you're able to do the one special power that you have. And by learning the basics of these other tasks, you're able to figure out which of them you enjoy doing yourself and which of them are low-paid. You get low refund value out of them and you can hire them out to other people to do. And also, maybe you get tired of some of the tasks and you can just simply pay other people Like you're running ads, you don't want to do it, pay somebody else to do it, an ads agency to run the ads against your books or any of these other things. There's a whole series of hundreds of tasks, actually I think it's a thousand tasks in all that are all the different things around self-publishing that you could theoretically be doing from building your email lists to setting up a web page to all of these things that can be very powerful at driving traffic and you can get very discouraged as you move forward through the process. So by building a team of people who are good at these skills you should still learn the basics but building up that team we're able to get momentum and keep on doing the one thing that's your special power which maybe it is writing the books or maybe it's the marketing of the books or maybe it's sometimes putting the books together or the descriptions or finding the keywords. There's a number of tasks that you yourself may be especially good at and I'm not saying that one of these versus the others is the right task for you but I can say that I wrote a series of books. They did fine and some of them were best sellers on Amazon, but then when I paid other people to write books on subjects I wasn't as good at, but I knew that they would sell because of the keywords being powerful, they started out selling my own books. I want you to think about that as an author. That was when I began to understand the power of the marketing side of things and understand that look, if I can pay somebody else to write a book that's going to outperform my own personal books, I was blown away by this and I could not even believe that that was even possible, But it was this whole concept of, if you have a team together, you're able to do these experiments. And that funds the salaries for my two permanent employees as well. And so just a couple thoughts to keep in mind. But let's get on to the secret point of today. And the secret is, you aren't going to do this right. But with practice, you will find yourself with the team that is right for you. The team that's right for me will not be the team that's right for you. And only over time are you going to find the exact people that you're going to need to have on your team that are best with you in terms of communication and the style and the professionalism and the price and the budget that you have available to you to find the people that are going to work best for you. You may have to test out a lot of people. I think I hired in all 20 people and two people are the remaining ones of that list. And one of the tools that I used was in fact running them through the courses that I offer where they would go through the video courses and then they would attempt to create the books based upon what they were learning in the lessons and they were either able to do it or they weren't able to do it and I kept the ones that were able to do it. Everybody gets paid as I'm building the team so we can just do some experiments to find out who works best for you or for me in this case. And so, but it is in the team and the system. This combination of team and system, if you put them together in the right way, we're going to see your book selling a lot more copies, we're going to see your output of how much you can produce increasing and you're going to see the sales jumping. So I don't know what your dream, what your vision is for this whole self-publishing thing. Whether it's you want to have it as your full-time job or whether you want to make it making much more money than your day job, I don't really know what your personal goals are, what kind of lifestyle you wish to have while you're sleeping and it's selling books. But if the system and the team, if you do not have them in place, I can guarantee you you're probably going to fail here. Almost everybody I've seen and talked with who's been very successful in the self-publishing business has always had their team and a system in place to ensure that they're maximizing the sales and that they're doing and focusing in on their one superhuman strength which every one of us have. You just need to figure out what it is for you. My question for you today is, have you started building your self-publishing team? If you have, write yes below in the comments and if you have not yet started, write no in the comments because I need to know where you're coming from and how far you've come with building your team and if this is a topic that is of interest to you. So go ahead and let me know and check up above me here for more video answers to your self-publishing questions. Thanks.